Carl Ray Miller

This course introduces students to the history, culture, and practice of architecture, interior architecture, and historic preservation through lectures, field trips, and hands-on exercises. Students learn fundamentals of spatial analysis and representation through orthographic drawing, understand the cultural context in which spatial practices operate, and explore architectural design. Class work may include field trips to historic buildings; visits to archives, exhibitions, or events; and design exercises introducing plan, section, elevation, and scale; translation between two- and three-dimensional representations of space; and architectural diagramming.

This course introduces students to the history, culture, and practice of architecture, interior architecture, and historic preservation through lectures, field trips, and hands-on exercises. Students learn fundamentals of spatial analysis and representation through orthographic drawing, understand the cultural context in which spatial practices operate, and explore architectural design. Class work may include field trips to historic buildings; visits to archives, exhibitions, or events; and design exercises introducing plan, section, elevation, and scale; translation between two- and three-dimensional representations of space; and architectural diagramming.

This 6-credit (two day) design studio is an opportunity for summative, integrated undergraduate work in architecture. Teaching leads students through theoretical and historical precedent, site and program analysis, to a design proposal that addresses contemporary issues in the built environment with a focus on architecture and how it serves the public. Students are expected to produce comprehensive design proposals that express and embody conceptual positions. Students are expected to respond to topical briefs put forward by their teacher that incorporate knowledge from areas of architectural practice such as preservation, interior design, or urbanism; and that respond to specific, contemporary challenges and opportunities in the built environment such as sustainability, public space, or the impacts of advanced technology. Class work includes precedent studies and site analysis, site visits, and preparation and presentation of a design proposal. At the conclusion of the semester, students participate in the Studio Show, an exhibition of capstone work organized by faculty and students in the department's gallery. Studnets and faculty participate as critics in concluding events the Department's Architecture Studios as part of their coursework. This course requires 12 credits of Architecture Studio: Practice to register. This course requires students to have a laptop that meets SAIC's minimum hardware specifications and runs the department software template including Rhino and Revit.

The Introductory studio in the accredited professional graduate degree addresses the relationship between natural and cultural ecologies and the notion of site as contextual generators of architectural ideas. Including ideas about co-existence, thresholds, material flows and urban-rural bio-regions and systems. Course goals and objectives include the role that site and context play in contemporary architectural design, understanding design processes, developing basic design methods, conceptual experimentation and rigor. The studio requires the conceptual design of a small architectural intervention within a complex site and an intermediate level of visual and architectural analysis and representation through diagrams, plans, sections, elevations and physical and digital models.

Readings, textual and visual case studies and site visits will vary, but always provide the background and theoretical grounding for the site and project analysis and final project development and representation.

Project work is a cumulative archive of the process of problem analysis and design exploration that are translations of observations, facts and ideas, all being made visible through diagrams, drawings and models. Students will work collaboratively and individually on a variety of assignments. Work on the final course project will be done individually.

Student and program criteria that address the most recent National Architectural Accreditation Board (NAAB) requirements will be highlighted and form part of the coursework outcomes.